Documenting the context of social change

In Little Rock, Ark., 1957, a white mob taunted students trying to cross the color line. Thanks to AP’s Will Counts, we know what the scene looked like. He made the moment immortal with his photo of the young Elizabeth Eckford attempting to walk down the street after Arkansas National Guardsmen blocked her entry at the schoolhouse steps.

In “Children of Crisis,” Robert Coles wrote about young people confronting the inbred bigotry of social systems. According to Coles, few of the adults who delivered the trauma renounced their previous behavior. Most simply toned themselves down, and because the civil rights movement successfully called them to higher ground, forgot they had ever run on fever pitch. Their racism became covert and less dangerous.

A prime example of covert is the white man in the Simi Valley interviewed by Jane Gross of The New York Times (here) after the Rodney King verdict. Defending his town against the charge of racism, he told her, “There’s a black person up our street and we say “Hi’ like he’s a normal person.”

Is there a better one sentence self-portrait in American journalism? What happened to him since then? Covert can roll back into overt or disappear, depending on the context.

C. Vann Woodward documented a dramatic slide into the negative in “Tom Watson: Agrarian Rebel.” Watson started his career as a reformer and a populist, but he dug deep for the hate after he’d lost elections for being insufficiently hostile to black people. It didn’t happen again. He was a key supporter of the deadly revival of the KKK in 1915.

Like Watson, Johnson had populist roots, and his rise through Southern politics demanded that he stand with the old guard: “During his first 20 years, 1937 through 1956, in the House and Senate, he had voted against every civil rights bill — even bills aimed at ending lynching.”

His political ambition exceeded his moral one. Unlike Watson, however, Johnson was operating on a national stage. Late in the 1950s, “he realized that he would never become president unless he removed the ‘magnolia scent’ of the South.”

In the national context, he was better off with his better self.

That’s why he was able to lead a successful effort to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1965. It was an about-face that stunned Martin Luther King Jr., who’d given up on LBJ only to find him leading the charge.

Caro quotes part of the speech that made King, who never cried, cry: “Even if we pass this bill,” Johnson said, “the battle will not be over. What happened in Selma is part of a far larger movement which reaches into every section and state of America. It is the effort of American Negroes to secure for themselves the full blessings of American life.”

And, Lyndon Johnson said: “Their cause must be our cause, too. Because it is not just Negroes, but really it is all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice.”